Celebratio Mathematica

David H. Blackwell

A Tribute to David Blackwell

by Yannis Yatracos

I came to meet Dav­id Black­well in the 1978–1979
aca­dem­ic year, when I com­menced my gradu­ate
work in stat­ist­ics at UC Berke­ley. I found him to
be a very warm in­di­vidu­al, ex­hib­it­ing a pos­it­ive
at­ti­tude to­ward all stu­dents, and in par­tic­u­lar
new­comers. He made him­self avail­able to an­swer
all kinds of ques­tions re­gard­less of time. Dur­ing
my stay at Berke­ley, I had the op­por­tun­ity
to hold sev­er­al dis­cus­sions with him about the
sub­ject of stat­ist­ics and the pro­fes­sion, the de­part­ment
there, aca­dem­ic ca­reers, and life out­side
aca­demia. He was al­ways straight­for­ward, in­form­at­ive,
help­ful, and gen­er­ous in shar­ing his vast
know­ledge and ex­per­i­ences. In so­cial and stu­dent-re­lated
is­sues and in de­part­ment­al is­sues shared
with stu­dents, he was in gen­er­al more lib­er­al than
most of his col­leagues, usu­ally in agree­ment with
Lu­cien Le Cam.
Here is a token of re­mem­brance
of some in­stances of per­son­al in­ter­ac­tion with
him. As a mem­ber of my Ph.D. thes­is com­mit­tee,
he provided in my mail­box the solu­tion to one
of the ques­tions I had asked him about re­lated
ref­er­ences. With re­gard to the po­ten­tial em­ploy­ment
of un­der­gradu­ates as teach­ing as­sist­ants in
stat­ist­ics courses, the Stat­ist­ics Gradu­ate Stu­dents
As­so­ci­ation (SGSA), ex­press­ing ser­i­ous con­cerns,
cre­ated an ad hoc com­mit­tee to handle the is­sue.
I also par­ti­cip­ated, and a meet­ing of the om­buds­man
was ar­ranged with the en­tire de­part­ment.
Pro­fess­or Black­well un­equi­voc­ally stated to the ad
hoc com­mit­tee that the de­part­ment had a fin­an­cial
ob­lig­a­tion to­ward Ph.D. stu­dents un­til com­ple­tion
of the de­gree and that this ob­lig­a­tion should be
ad­dressed. In 1983, be­fore my gradu­ation, I had
an ex­tens­ive dis­cus­sion with him about the vari­ous
mod­els of aca­dem­ic ca­reers and, not to my
sur­prise, he sup­por­ted the Brit­ish mod­el. At that
time fac­ulty ranks in the Brit­ish uni­versit­ies were
lec­turer, seni­or lec­turer, read­er, and pro­fess­or.
Lec­tur­ers be­came per­man­ent after a pro­ba­tion­ary
peri­od that nor­mally re­quired no more than
three years. Pro­mo­tion to seni­or lec­turer was of­ten
based on prowess in teach­ing and ad­min­is­tra­tion.
Pro­mo­tion to read­er was based on achieve­ments
in re­search and would usu­ally pre­cede pro­mo­tion
to pro­fess­or. In a more re­cent email con­tact with
him in June 2008, I sent a greet­ing note with some
of my pa­pers that he might be in­ter­ested in. He
replied im­me­di­ately with kind and warm words,
as he al­ways did dur­ing the last thirty years.
Berke­ley stu­dents who came to know Pro­fess­or
Dav­id Black­well will al­ways re­mem­ber him as the
gen­er­ous, kind, and warm per­son he was; he will
be greatly missed.

The Bib­li­o­graph­ic Data, be­ing a mat­ter of fact and
not cre­at­ive ex­pres­sion, is not sub­ject to copy­right.
To the ex­tent pos­sible un­der law,
Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences Pub­lish­ers
has waived all copy­right and re­lated or neigh­bor­ing rights to the
Bib­li­o­graph­ies on Cel­eb­ra­tio Math­em­at­ica,
in their par­tic­u­lar ex­pres­sion as text, HTML, Bib­TeX data or oth­er­wise.